Photo courtesy of Ganesh Ramalingam
AUSTIN, Texas, May 1, 2026 (Globe Newswire) — Zapdos Labs, an AI software company headquartered in Austin, Texas with offices in Singapore, has closed a $500,000 pre-seed funding round to expand its AI Video Agent platform for manufacturers. The company’s platform connects to a factory’s existing CCTV cameras, reads and configures the facility’s unique safety manual, and monitors live feeds in real-time to detect safety violations and near misses before they occur. All of this happens within about two days of deployment.
Until recently, computer vision systems required months of labeled training data and large technical teams for every use case, and the price tag for Tier 2 and Tier 3 plants completely excluded real-time monitoring. Today’s VLMs read factory safety manuals the same way they read other documents and can be applied directly to live video feeds without manual labeling. This capability allows Zapdos’ platform to be deployed in days instead of months and can be deployed on existing camera infrastructure at a price point that midsize manufacturers can absorb.
Zapdos AI video agents identify restricted area violations, PPE non-compliance, and high-risk behavior and send instant alerts through Telegram, WhatsApp, or your existing video management system. The company also maintains Unblink, an open source video infrastructure project with more than 1,400 GitHub stars, reflecting a developer community that closed competitors in the space haven’t built.
Within 60 days of launch, Zapdos Labs secured a contract with the Air Force and a Fortune 500 company and additional pilots. It currently operates in Texas and Singapore, with anchor sites in North America and Southeast Asia.
The company has also been recognized in Enterprise Singapore’s national deeptech competition, Slingshot 2025 (Zapdos selected as one of the top 60 deeptech startups out of 8,000), and the NVIDIA Inception program. Zapdos won first place in the Nebius Hackathon for Real-Time Vision Language Models and received a grant from Elemental Labs.
Pre-seed funding will be used to expand the engineering team and deploy additional anchor sites.
Zapdos Labs was co-founded by Ganesh Ramalingam (CEO), who worked in elite signals intelligence before turning to industrial AI, and Tri Nguyen (CTO), who holds a master’s degree in machine learning from the University of Basel and previously led engineering at Ubisoft. Ramalingam founded the company after losing his uncle to a workplace accident, but believes the incident could have been prevented with continuous real-time monitoring.
“An accident changed everything for our family.” Ganesh said. “That never left me. The mission is simple: make sure no family ever has to answer that phone call again.”
Tri Nguyen, CTO and co-founder, added: “Video AI is finally catching up to what manufacturers actually need. We chose to build on vision language models because we can learn each customer’s environment from the documentation they already have. No labeling, no latency. This changes who can provide continuous safety monitoring and, over time, what else can be done on the same infrastructure.”
Manufacturing remains one of the world’s largest industries without real-time, continuous visibility into day-to-day operations. With more than 250,000 manufacturing facilities in the United States alone and an equally large market across Southeast Asia, many mid-market factories still rely on paper checklists and regular human audits to track safety.
According to Zapdos Labs customer interviews, these facilities spend an average of $400,000 annually on compliance, while potentially carrying approximately $7 million in unhedged liability related to unrecorded near-miss incidents. For Zapdos Labs, this gap represents a broader opportunity to introduce software-based monitoring into factory environments that have operated for years without continuous digital monitoring.
About
Zapdos Labs is a software company headquartered in Austin, Texas with offices in Singapore. The company builds AI video agents for manufacturing and industrial environments that connect to existing camera infrastructure to provide real-time safety monitoring, near-miss detection, and automated alerts. The goal is to make continuous safety monitoring available to mid-market manufacturing facilities.
contact address:
Contact Name: Ganesh Ramalingam
Company Name: Zapdos Labs
Contact email address: anesh@zapdoslabs.com
Website: https://www.zapdoslabs.com
Austin, Texas
A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/490086b7-2b11-41dd-9f28-43e1f03407f6.
